


should overseers come to call, know your strictures, one and all

by aerynlallaboso



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, mention of Rat-Eating, mentions of canon-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 13:12:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7619440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynlallaboso/pseuds/aerynlallaboso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Keep both hands on the plow, lest the Outsider find use for them.</i><br/>- The Sayings of the Overseer, 13</p><p>(Corvo has never been a great believer in the Abbey of the Everyman.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	should overseers come to call, know your strictures, one and all

**Author's Note:**

> i wouldn't be surprised if someone else has written something like this before but if so, i haven't read it & im posting this anyway \\(-_-)/
> 
> anyway i love dishonored & hope you enjoy. this comes w brief mentions of Murder and Rat-Eating as tagged, mentions of a bunch of main-game characters and super vaguely implied corvosider its barely even there

i. wandering gaze

He can’t help it, after a while - everything that shines, he takes. It isn’t relevant to any of the missions he is sent on; he isn’t ordered to do it, but he knows the Loyalists are desperate for coin and will take anything they can get, without asking questions. Into his pocket and out, into Piero’s hands and then off to the black market somewhere. He doesn’t ask questions, either.

It’s not like they pay him, anyway. All Havelock has to give are promises, all Pendleton has are half-disguised insults, and Martin - he doesn’t want anything from Martin, not least those sickly smiles. He steals everything in the Boyle mansion that isn’t nailed down and the guests that see him say, “Oh, go ahead. it’s not like they’re short of cash.”

Nobody he takes from is short of money, in a city that is slowly crumbling into a sea of rats and poor men and women weeping blood. They won’t miss a few trinkets.

 

 

ii. lying tongue

He doesn’t lie often. Compared to the other Strictures, he breaks it infrequently and minorly. Telling the Admiral he’s off to retire to bed (when he’s really going to curl up in the corner of the attic and stare at a rune for a few hours), telling Pendleton he doesn’t know where the bottle of brandy he was drinking went (dropped out a window by an enraged Lydia), telling Emily he’s sure her mother is somewhere light and beautiful (the Heart is dark and ticks with machinery no mortal could possibly understand yet).

When he was younger, much younger, his mother impressed upon him that lying was one of the worst things a person could do. It breaks bonds of trust, she told him solemnly. It means that the other person can never again be sure if you’re telling the truth. To tell a lie is to do a bad deed, no matter how small or whatever the reason.

Even if you’re lying to protect somebody else, mama?

Even then, Corvo.

He’s not so sure his mother was right.

 

 

iii. restless hands

He blames Daud for this one. And Hiram Burrows, Overseer Campbell, everyone who was complicit in the murder of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, because by killing his empress and taking her ( _his_ ) daughter they stole away his purpose in life - to protect.

His hands itched in Coldridge. From the cold and the bites, mostly, but there was another itch, right down in his bones, that wasn’t sated until the day the meal from a friend was delivered to his cell and he held a sword in his hand once again (and drove it into the neck of the guard outside, angling so that it bit through the soft flesh and missed the bone at the back).

The Loyalists find him Emily to protect again. He is already deep in the grasp of a new purpose.

(Is it really heresy if it is men who told him to kill, and the Outsider gave him only the tools to do it? He doubts the Overseers would see it that way, but he amuses himself by imagining using it as a defence in the court of law that he would certainly never see, if he were to be caught.)

 

 

iv. roving feet

Trespassing is a given and a necessity to him now. It barely passes his mind to count it as a crime anymore, given that all his other offences are so much more serious. Why, by the time the herald could finish reading every count of trespassing he has performed in the course of his work, he would’ve slaughtered him and every other armed man between the courtroom and the exit.

To tell the truth, Corvo has never worried himself much about the Fourth Stricture. As Lord Protector, he had the authority to enter almost any house he chose, and the excuse for it as well; he simply had to say that he was investigating a threat against the Empress, and he would be invited in by any law-abiding citizen. Non-law-abiding citizens would usually attempt to put up a fight at this point, which suited him just fine too.

Some readings, he was told one day by a fresh and overzealous Overseer, would paint him a heretic just for having been born in a land other than Gristol. That was the day Corvo stopped listening to anything the Overseers said.

 

 

v. rampant hunger

Before Jessamine died, he never ate much. It was considered at court a quirk of his heritage, but in truth he simply did not have the appetite to avail himself of the large and varied meals served at Dunwall Tower. He preferred smaller meals, eaten on his feet or in Jessamine’s chambers with Emily stealing bites of their food when she finished her own.

Now - he is moving almost constantly, pausing only in shadow to slip past guards and dogs and guard-dogs, and it has taken a toll on his metabolism. Not to mention the incessant fatigue of the Mark; the drain on his body is such that he has taken to eating whatever he finds as he runs, climbs, Blinks through dwellings. He almost chokes when he sees the buffet on display at the Boyle party (not just for himself, but for all the starving people he sees on the street).

He refuses to acknowledge the _other_  hunger, the one that gnaws like a rat at his belly and that something tells him could only be satisfied by exactly that. He has a vivid image of himself, curled over in the gutter, dark blood running down his chin as he tears his teeth through the guts and meat of a rat and crunches down its bones and tail, the nightmare man who stalks the nobles in their towers with black magic and ratflesh in his belly.

Half of it is already true. He will not let the rest become so.

 

 

vi. wanton flesh

He only breaks this one when he is asleep.

Most of his dreams are of Jessamine, before she died, her warmth wrapped around him and soothing him in his cold bed, her curves softening the sharp edges he has acquired and hardened throughout the day as he goes about his work. Often those dreams end with the sharpest edge embedded in her chest, though, and he wakes trembling with phantom rivulets of blood streaming from his hands.

He starts to have other dreams. A cold chill instead of the fresh heat of Jessamine’s touch ghosting down his spine. The taste of saltwater and poisoned wine on his lips. The feeling of edges touching edges and kissing a marble statue which lets him do as he likes until dawn arrives, and the statue coils its pale flesh around him - the pale of sea foam, of carved whalebone - and whispers his name into his ear.

(He always tries to forget. It comes back to him every time he visits a shrine.)

Corvo has never been a great believer in the Abbey of the Everyman, but whenever he wakes from _those_  dreams, whalesong ringing in his head, he can almost feel the crackle of the heretic’s brand at his cheek.

 

 

vii. errant mind

If he were to size them up, Corvo might label this, the final Stricture, as the one he breaks the most. Breaks is the wrong word; perhaps _fails_  might be better.

 _‘Two contrary thoughts cannot long abide in a man’s mind, or he will become weak-willed,’_ the Seventh Stricture reads, and for once, he agrees with the Abbey, though perhaps he does not have the same ideas about which thought to banish. Clarity of mind is something he must have to carry out his tasks. Hesitation - pausing without good reason before he steps, before he slits a throat or fires a bolt - cannot be brooked, or he will soon stumble into a ditch and break his neck at the bottom.

And yet.

Within Corvo is a man who would prefer never to take a life. Within Corvo is a man who would lay waste to the entire city if it would bring back the woman he loves. Within Corvo is a man who trusts the Loyalists and believes in their plan, and a man who doubts every honeyed word that drips from their lips. Without Corvo, there is a Mark that pulses unearthly on the back of his hand, and all of these things weigh on him with the burden of the Void itself such that he feels he is liable to break his own neck without the help of a ditch.

He decides, scaling Dunwall Tower’s water lock and scanning the grounds and spotting more than a dozen ways to get inside the fortress where he once lived and loved, that it does not matter. In the end, to doubt is to be human (at least, his private definition, and he has more experience dealing with the inhuman than likely any Overseer can claim). No Stricture can fix that.

 

 

viii.

Martin leaves his copy of the Seven Strictures in Corvo’s bedroom the night before he murders the Lord Regent, ostensibly by accident. Corvo does not give it a second glance.


End file.
